Foucault's analysis of discourse — systems of knowledge/power that determine what can be said, thought, and known in a given historical period — has influenced poets who examine the discursive frameworks that shape poetic production, including M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong!," which inhabits and subverts legal discourse; In the Renaissance, poetic discourse occupied a specific social position with its own rules, genres, and purposes, and poets like Sidney in his "Defence of Poetry" engage philosophically with the question of what poetic discourse is and what it can accomplish; A poet writing about medicine might explore medical discourse philosophically — the specific language, categories, and power relations of clinical practice — asking what human experiences are made possible or impossible by the way medicine speaks; Adrienne Rich's "The Dream of a Common Language" explicitly engages with discourse philosophy — the argument that women need to create a new discourse adequate to their experience, rather than inhabiting the inherited discourse shaped by patriarchal assumptions; Language poetry's foregrounding of the materiality of language is a philosophical intervention in discourse — the claim that all discourse is constructed, that its transparency is an illusion, and that this illusion serves ideological functions; Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia — the coexistence of multiple social discourses within a single text — informs poets who deliberately mix registers and discourses (legal, scientific, lyric, colloquial) to produce a dialogic text that refuses the monologism of a single authoritative discourse